Miniature planes offer tons of fun

Sefton Ipock/Independent Mail
Jim Smith holds a radio-controlled plane as George Estes looks for damage after a hard landing at the Tri-County RC Flyers airfield near the Anderson Regional Airport. Estes said that repairs on the balsa wood frame are easy to make.

Independent Mail

As a boy, John Moll was enthralled when military planes returning from World War II would buzz the valley of his hometown in the Pocono Mountains.

That’s why he now makes his way to the Anderson County Airport on most Tuesday and Saturday mornings.

Like his friends, he knows the familiar dirt-and-gravel driveway that leads to the runway. This runway, at the end of this gravel driveway, is grass and considerably smaller than its paved counterpart that the county owns.

The planes that land on this grassy strip have wings that span inches instead of feet. They can be hoisted up with two arms, and can be fixed, at times, with rubber bands or tape.

This is the home for the Tri-County Flyers, a group of radio-controlled plane pilots.

Moll is one of them.

“I wanted to fly when I was 6 years old,” Moll said. “I remember those planes coming over our valley. They’d run those motors up, and it would rattle all the windows in town. From then, I was hooked.”

Big, full-size planes were not something that Moll would work on until he was an adult serving in the Air Force. But as a child, he and his father would build toy planes together.

“He was just as interested in planes as I was,” Moll said. “He just didn’t have any money.”

Since 1948, Moll has been flying some type of model airplane. He has passed on his love of planes to his son, John Moll Jr., who is actually building a full-size plane.

Roughly 18 people are now part of the Tri-County Flyers. For at least 30-plus years, the Flyers have been meeting in Anderson County, practicing their flips, turns and dives in these small aircraft.

Their club is one of about a half-dozen such groups just in the Upstate. In their ranks are people who love flying.

The handful of pilots who have gathered at the grassy runway on this day do not remember when Tri-County Flyers actually formed.

What they do know is that before it located here, at the Anderson County Airport, their runway was at the old BASF plant, near S.C. 81 South. In 2010, when First Quality began construction at the old BASF site, the band of model-plane pilots went searching for a new runway.

“We get hungry for flying,” said one of the pilots, George Estes. “Some folks like golfing or fishing. We like flying.”

Most weeks, they will fly for several hours at a time out here. Just a week ago, several of these pilots were out on this runway, showing dozens of Boy Scouts how to fly.

All four of these men have been flying these small aircraft for years.

Estes, like Moll, fell in love with planes when he was a boy. A child of the Great Depression, Estes started not with an electric model but with one that was made of thin wood and cost him 5 cents at the local drugstore.

Estes grew up in Allen County, Ky., and was raised by a father who worked as a mechanic and raised a family of four on $15 a week.

“I was lucky to get a nickel,” Estes said.

It was 1935 when he got hooked, he said. He was visiting family for the Christmas holidays, and his cousin told him that if he could get a nickel from his mother that they could buy a model plane at the store.

“It had a propeller with a rubber band on it,” Estes said. “We flew them in the house until they tore up. Dad would get mad because he started running out of razor blades.”

That was before the planes came with their pieces and parts already cut out ready for assembly, Estes said, showing off the scars on his hands. So razor blades were used to cut out parts.

It didn’t matter how difficult they were to put together though. He’s been flying planes ever since.

Eventually, he graduated to more complicated airplanes — ones that were powered with more than a rubber band. He said he had his first motorized plane in 1943. When he grew up, the planes became an outlet for relaxation.

“My biggest thrill is to fly it like it is a full-size plane,” Estes said. “When that plane left the ground, my work day was behind me. It was the best thing to relax that I ever did.”

Ken Whitfield, an Anderson native, said he got hooked when he was a student at Anderson Boys High and worked part-time at Dillard’s Sporting Goods in Anderson. At the time, Dillard’s had a hobby department. There, Whitfield said he discovered model airplanes.

Like Moll, Whitfield enlisted in the Air Force. He has worked on full-size aircraft, too. Through the years, Whitfield, like his fellow pilots, has collected more radio-controlled and model airplanes than he can count.

And on his ball cap, Whitfield wears his Air Force wings alongside pins that he has earned from flying the smaller planes.

“When I was learning, I would fly for two seconds and spend two weeks putting it back together,” Whitfield said.

“I have been hooked since I worked at Dillard’s,” Whitfield said. “We just have a lot of fun out here.”